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4 Things You Need to Know About Google's New AdWords Policies

Google is launching a “new and improved” AdWords Policy Center aimed at making policies more user-friendly and accessible to advertisers, according to an announcement buried in their AdWords Policy Help resources.

So what's new? Google has released a preview of the new center alongside their announcement. Here's what you need to know about the changes.

1. If you're in compliance now, you won't be a rule-breaker come September… well, most of you, anyway.

In their announcement, Google noted, "Almost all advertisers who comply with our current policies will also comply with the new policies."

Yes, there will be fundamental policy changes that will affect some advertisers more than others. There will be new restrictions on weapons, tobacco and fireworks advertising as per their Dangerous Products & Services Policy, as Google mentioned in their announcement.

In examples of content they don't allow, Google AdWords now points out “Low Quality Content,” which they define as:

Content that is designed for the primary purpose of showing ads, i.e. Driving traffic (whether through "arbitrage" or otherwise) to destinations with more ads than original content, little or no original content, or excessive advertising.

Content that is replicated from another source without adding value in the form of original content or additional functionality, i.e. mirroring, framing or scraping.

Some, like the Sitelinks Extension and AdMob Ads policies, remain the same. The sections Character Limit, Editorial Standards and Mobile/Tablet Ads have been removed and either scrapped or integrated into other relevant policies.

Basically, you're going to want to go over the technical requirement policies for the types of ads you use, even if only as a refresher to ensure you stay compliant.

For some reasons that always struck me as odd, Google seems to have "stricter" rules than Bing which results in those advertisers that struggle with Google's policies to "vote with their feet" and effectively google drives some traffic Bing's way, as it seems.

Very interesting article. I'm surprised you haven't mention the considerable change in Adult sites & content industry. Google Adwords has decide to stop the Adult industry advertisement to advertize through its tool. Tho it had allow it for at least the last 10 years. Did you know about that?